Consider nuclear power. Overnight construction costs for early U.S. demonstration reactors fell 81 percent between 1954 and 1968. For reactors begun between 1967 and 1972, costs rose 187 percent. The 1971 Calvert Cliffs decision and then the reaction to Three Mile Island in 1979 accelerated the cost increases and slowed construction even more. Note the order. The turn was underway years before the accident that everyone blames for it.

What might have happened had the earlier learning and deployment trends continued? Peter Lang’s 2017 paper in Energies estimates that nuclear power would have cost about one-tenth as much by 2015. The additional generation could have avoided as many as 9.5 million premature deaths.

The number is staggering even when quartered. Millions of deaths. Yet, the graveyard was both invisible and silent.

(Furthermore, climate change would not be a problem today had nuclear power not been handicapped.)

The nuclear story you probably know but Niko McCarty has an excellent new Works in Progress piece on an invisible graveyard of technology that I knew almost nothing about.

In the 1980s, officials decided to regulate engineered microbes under the Toxic Substances Control Act, a law written for industrial chemicals. Microbes swap genes all the time, but EPA treats them as “new” whenever DNA is introduced from another genus. As a result, even a marker gene used simply to identify successfully edited cells can trigger review if it remains in the organism. McCarty reports that researchers filed more than 240 applications between 1987 and 2018: “Only a few were ever approved for widespread use.”

What have we lost? We can’t know for sure but among the plausible losses McCarty discusses are engineered bacteria that detect buried explosives, microbes that extract rare-earth metals and improved plastic-digesting enzymes. Similarly, Chernia et al. write:

Promising many societal benefits, emergent products of biotechnology involve releasing genetically modified microbes (GMMs) into the environment. However, regulatory challenges limit their use. So far, GMMs have mainly been tested in agriculture and environmental cleanup, with few approved for commercial purposes. Current government regulations inadequately address modern genetic engineering and limit the potential of gut therapeutics, skin products, self-repairing materials, ocean pollution treatment, anti-corrosion coatings, etc.

And those are just some of the plausible first-stage losses. Perhaps even more importantly, we learn by doing. Thus, no doing, no learning. The first approved product is rarely the safest or the best but when we fail to approve the first we don’t get the much better 5th. Forty years of that process could have taken us well beyond the applications McCarty describes. We must build to build better.

Nuclear power at least left us enough reactors to get some idea of what we lost. With microbes, I needed McCarty to tell me there was something missing even though I study these issues for a living. And note one reason new microbe loss was invisible. No vote was ever taken. No debate was ever had. Officials in the 1980s reasoned that genomes are made of chemicals and chemicals are covered, and that doctrine has governed the field ever since despite being overly broad and excessively costly. How many other gaps in our technology have explanations buried in the Federal Register?
—

Here is a video version of this post. Which do  you like better?

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Will 21st century transportation innovations work against urban density, as the car did in the 20th century, or promote urban centralization, as the railroad did in the 19th century? Reducing the cost of commuting always reduces urban centralization in the classic Alonso-Muth-Mills model but that result reverses if the number of trips is endogenous and the elasticity of trips with respect to their costs is greater than one. That elasticity may have increased over time, as an increasing share of daily trips seems to be discretionary and city centers increasingly provide entertainment. This paper asks discusses the urbanizing effects of four trends in transportation technology: shared mobility (such as Uber), autonomy (such as Waymo), vertical travel and green mobility, as provided by bike lane. As people spend more time travelling in denser, large areas, innovations that reduce the time cost of travel, such as autonomous cars, seem likely to complement urban living, as long as they don’t excessively increase traffic. Sharing is also easier in big cities, so technologies that involve sharing are also centripetal. The other trends seem less likely to have major effects. Moreover, the forces of inertia, which include both regulation and legacy infrastructure, are likely to limit the impact of any new technologies in Europe and the U.S., so that the biggest changes in urban form are likely to appear in east Asia and the developing world.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Ed Glaeser.

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Instead of Amazon, I spent the past week browsing a new breed of websites known as “dopamine sites,” a trend that emerged in South Korea. These websites — like Dopamine Shop and FoodNeverComes — recreate the entire ritual of online shopping: You search for products, compare reviews, add items to your cart, enter a shipping address, place an order, and even track your delivery.

Then … nothing happens. No money changes hands. No package arrives.

Here is more from Itika Sharma Punit.  Via the excellent Samir Varma.

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2. Eliezer predictions.

3. Are humpback whales policing nature?

4. “Traces of nearly four million coins reveal how Rome achieved economic integration.”

5. Estimating cybersecurity costs (numbers).

6. Great Barrier Reef is doing fine?

7. California Forever meets further setbacks (NYT).

The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• 1. Clicked on the link on age verification systems, but I ... by Crikey
• In reply to jason y. Fair enough, I should say that his ... by Spinor
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Standard optimal capital tax theory abstracts from modeling asset prices, making it unsuitable for thinking about capital gains and wealth taxation. We study optimal redistributive taxation in an environment with asset price movements, adopting the modern finance view that asset prices fluctuate not only because of changing cash flows, but also due to other factors (“discount rates”). We show that a combination of realization-based capital gains and cash flow taxes implements the optimal allocation regardless of the source of asset-price fluctuations. Moreover, the capital gains tax avoids distortions in portfolio choice (the socalled lock-in effect) by targeting total net trades rather than gains from selling individual assets. These results stand in contrast to the classic Haig-Simons comprehensive income tax concept as well as recent proposals for wealth or accrual-based capital gains taxes.

Wealth taxes lose the comparison.  That is from Econometrica, by Mark Aguiar, Benjamin Moll, and Florian Scheuer.

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• In reply to Marie. This seems to be a distinction after the ... by Dino Sauron
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Shane Regan, Long Island, 16, AI agents.

Maximilian Kornstein, 15, Atlanta area, agents and general career support.

Irene Chen and Jessica Dai, UC Berkeley, data on peptides use.

Evan Warfel, Bay Area, updated meta-analyses through AI.

Daniel Dominguez Gomez, biomedical think tank for Mexico.

Malhaar Agrawal, U Penn., prediction markets and clinical trials.

Andrei Russel Ismael, Harvard, biomedical start-up.

Benedict Springbett, London, conference on the importance of legal issues for UK growth.

Metin Metin, Izmir, Turkey, 15, AI and brain organoid electrophysiology.

Ben Vyshedskiy, Harvard, biology podcast.

Afra Wang, Bay Area, podcast and study of Chinese AI.

Joe Hazell, LSE, AI and macroeconomics.

Anne Arno, Krakow, writing and biography.

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• But is any of this “economics”?! by ShatGPT
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NYU Stern researcher @NateWitkin questions why cyber insurance rates keep falling if AI cyber risk is accelerating:

“Insurance rates for cyber risk declined by about 4% globally in Q2 of this year, and that’s actually the 12th consecutive quarter in which they’ve declined. This is very valuable signal that implies that at a minimum you shouldn’t overindex on the Hugging Face incident.”

“This is a plea for level headedness, but I think it would be helpful for safety folks to engage with these numbers just ’cause this is an avenue of criticism from folks like me and to an extent folks like Tyler.”

“Why are these numbers not moving? Is it because people are underestimating capabilities? Are they not taking the problem even as close to as seriously as they should or is it something else?”

Here is the link with video.  File under “Questions that are all too rarely asked.”

I am happy to admit that the answers here are far from obvious, and that I am myself expecting prices to rise somewhat.

I will continue to note that there are a remarkable number of ways, seen among other places on Twitter, to rephrase and to rationalize the statement: “I have the most remarkable and important and true macro risk story in the world to tell you.  Unfortunately, it does not correlate with any observed asset market prices.”

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• In reply to Phil King. Yes . . . terms and conditions, ... by MadMax2099
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2. Do children grow continuously, or grow in fits and starts?

3. It remains my view that Ferrante is the husband and wife team.

4. Essay on Olaf Stapledon.

5. “US annual interest expense is up to a record 18.5% of federal government revenue. This is officially above the previous record of 18.4% set in 1991. This percentage has more than QUADRUPLED over the last 4 years as interest expenditures on public debt skyrocketed.”  Link.

6. Statistical meddling at the Census Bureau.

The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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The landscape itself is like noting else in the Americas.  The altiplano is flat in the way that only vast geological formations can be flat, not the flatness of a plain that was once a sea, but the flatness of a plateau that was raised bodily by tectonic forces millions of years ago and then scoured by ten thousand years of wind and ice into the extraordinary emptiness it presents today.  The horizon in every direction is uninterrupted.  The sky is immense, a dome of blue so saturated at this altitude that photographs rarely convey it accurately, because the camera’s sensor cannot process a blue that contains no haze, no moisture, no atmospheric diffffusion between the sun and the surface.

And:

Arriving at El Alto International Airport (which sits on the altiplano above the city at forty-one hundred meters, making it the highest international airport in the world), you step off the plane into air so thin that the simple act of carrying your luggage to the terminal produces a shortness of breath that is mildly alarming if you have never experienced it and completely normal if you have.  The airport itself is unremarkable.  What happens next is not.  You get into a taxi or bus and the driver takes you to the edge of the antiplano, and then the city appears, not gradually but all at once, a cascade of buildings and lights and terracotta roofs pouring down the walls of a canyon so steep and so deep that the bottom is invisible from the rim.  La Paz does not reveal itself slowly.  It drops away beneath you like a held breath released.

Recommended, and yes Cochabamba is an amazing food city.

The post *Why Not Bolivia?* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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I study how short-form design amplifies self-control problems in digital media. Short units repeatedly renew temptation that lasts longer than each unit, turning local temptation into sustained overconsumption. Using microdata from a U.S. short-drama platform, I exploit a nonlinear top-up menu to infer viewing plans and show that paying users watch 82.1% more than intended. Structural estimates imply an average temptation horizon of 11.2 minutes, short relative to the full drama but long relative to one-minute episodes. Counterfactuals show that larger decision units, default limits, and breaks improve long-run welfare. A short-video calibration highlights the broader welfare relevance.

That is from Renjie Bao of Princeton University.  I believe a Princeton job market candidate?  Via Quan Le.

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2. China word of the day.

3. “People Keep Sneaking Into New York City Sewers. No One Knows Why.” (NYT)

4. Yiyang Zhuge has postponed her recording session with CWT, in case you will be wondering why the episode does not show up soon.

5. Who was the most consequential emperor in Chinese history?

6. Are science fiction films becoming more optimistic?

7. Ruxandra on clinical trials as the main obstacle (NYT).

8. The trend in U.S. cyberinsurance prices since 2020.

9. Fermat’s Last Theorem, the number of links cannot keep up with the world.

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Prediction markets offer a new market-based approach to measuring macroeconomic expectations in real-time. We evaluate the accuracy of prediction market-implied forecasts from Kalshi, the largest federally regulated prediction market overseen by the CFTC. We compare Kalshi with more traditional survey and market-implied forecasts, examine how expectations respond to macroeconomic and financial news, and how policy signals are interpreted by market participants. Our results suggest that Kalshi markets provide a high-frequency, continuously updated, distributionally rich benchmark that is valuable to both researchers and policymakers.

Kalshi gives one example of how this data might be used, the Citizen Debt Forecast (CDF). The CBO forecasts the future debt path but it updates only twice a year and is limited to a legislative baseline even when most observers expect, for example, taxes to increase or spending to be cut. The Kalshi CDF updates continuously and can build in market expectations about future legislative changes.

The Kalshi forecast, as seen below, is slightly more optimistic than the CBO forecast but I don’t read too much into that. The larger issue is how prediction market data can be integrated into a wide variety of forecasts.

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And so I have been looking into Bachmann more.  Her volume of letters with Max Frisch, her lover and the leading Swiss novelist of his time, is the best “letters book” I know.  After four hundred pages, with another 180 or so to go, I still am not bored.  It is called “Wir haben es nicht gut gemacht.” Der Briefwechsel.  (This November coming out in English…and probably the letters work well in English?)  Overall, it is remarkable how many ups and downs a relationship can have and persist.  It works best to read only a few of the letters at a time, so that the story does not go by too quickly.  One sees connections between the letters and the unfolding of Malina.

She also has letters volumes with Paul Celan and Henze, those are in my pile too.  (She and Henze were just friends.)  And just this year there was a wonderful new biography of Bachmann, namely Dieter Burdorf’s Dieses unruhige Ich: Ingeborg Bachmann.  I have started that.

There is a movie of Malina, an opera too, and a biopic about Bachmann and Frisch.  I have heard Max Frisch’s Montauk is partly about the Frisch-Bachman relationship as well.  And we haven’t even gotten yet to Volker Schlondorff, have we?

Bachmann has poetry in German, and a new edition of her short stories is coming out this fall in English.

It is wonderful to discover something/someone so new and unexpected.  And as I get older and know more, it happens less frequently than it used to.

I will continue with this.  Amazing (and charming) how many words people can spill about “stuff”!

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Comments

• https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Malina-Ingeborg-Bachmann/dp/351837... by sumadartson
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Internal documents reviewed by the FT show that three days earlier, behind the walls of Vaduz Castle, Europe’s wealthiest ruling dynasty had quietly approved an overhaul that strengthens the authority of a prince who already wields extraordinary power over his 42,000 citizens, while reducing some of the rights and checks exercised by his relatives in the Princely House of Liechtenstein.

Even before the changes, Prince Alois could veto legislation, dismiss the government, dissolve parliament, appoint judges and reject laws approved by referendum. In June, the Catholic prince said he would veto a citizens’ initiative to legalise abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, even if voters backed it…

The latest changes to the House Law go far beyond succession. According to internal documents, the prince gains greater discretion over who belongs to the dynasty and explicit authority to set rules on family names, titles and coats of arms. The Family Council, a body of relatives that oversees dynastic affairs, will expand from three to five members but loses an important check: the prince will no longer need its consent for pardons, only to consult it…

The reforms were approved not by parliament or the public, but by members of the dynasty itself.

Here is more from Paul Caruana Galizia at the FT.

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